


Somewhere in the Middle

by losselen (zambla)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Disaffected youths, Drug Use, Experimental, M/M, Photography, Punk Rock, community: a_humumentathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 06:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1335922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/losselen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer to autumn of 1977, London underground. Punk. Mr Black. Mr Lupin. A propos of nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere in the Middle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scythia](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=scythia).



> Originally written in 2005 for a_humumentathon for scythia. Minimally edited since.

 

She only  
buries their bodies, their wings.

The residues of toast and marmalade on the plate distracted him. It was morning. It was storming. Low and hard like violins gone mad. Not many sounds can be described as a spiderweb. And the spiders could never stand it—the rain and the marmalade. They trailed away. He tried to concentrate. He could not finish a single thought. A car's horn was going off in the street downstairs and that was a savage temptation, too. He tried to pray once, elbows leaning against the bed, bending his head. His mother was of the good Presbyterian faith before the unholy marriage, or something like that.

His jeans caught his knees when he tried to kneel, though, and he felt ridiculous.

 

 

She makes me feed them by hand  
twice a day for one full year

He's not seen her for so long that he's nearly forgotten her name. She wore her hair on her shoulders. Brown and curly. In the image he has of her you see a corner of her mouth—burnt sepia, golden ink—and her eyes in the process of laughing, dark and half-bright from the shadow of her hair. All around her the camera captured the textures so brilliantly he can almost touch them. The night throws the gleam and flicker of bars and headlights: framed behind her the meandering, unfaithful streets that went off maps, off course.

He has many, many pictures and none of them mattered.

 

 

(none of us is going to change anything.)

That week they went to punk gigs. Mr Lupin liked the screaming and Mr Black liked the drinking and the anarchy. All of us young lost fuckers need a messiah or five, Mr Black said, but it changes nothing. I wish it weren't all the same fucking shit. Mr Lupin commented calmly. Sirius just laughed and sniffled and mindlessly leafed through Remus's obsessive collection of mementos while Remus mumbled something about being starving.

-Who's she? he pointed to the picture.

-A girl.

-You don't fucking say. Who's she?

-I told you. This girl I used to know.

-Ah. Of that kind. He held the picture at arm's length and stared for a few seconds. She's okay looking, I suppose.

 

 

The strangeness will wear off  


 

The only window in your bedroom twisted west, quite unnaturally, as if the wood had realigned itself sometime after cutting. When you stand near it you can see the hedges and lines over the next building. The panes are black grease and white fog, opening outward, posing the same savage temptation. Once you perched, so still there on the sill, the wind going swirling around you, flapping through books and reports and loose papers. You could hear the sound of lives down there.

Wind so soothing against the fibers of your muscles you should have walked forward and let your feet fall.

But the wings were only figurative. Phantom organs fit for a symbol. In your own words: _appendages, sanded and marbled, the feathers of which could be effaced by sere air or hands_ But in the later italic notes there is pain and words like _foxes hunted_ It's that analogy you draw— _Winslow Homer, in the snow, creeping beneath crow or raven. His head turned, his tail low, leg raised. In the dark snow that killed the animals there were two gunshots: three spots of blood, one bush of scarlet berries. In that oceanside hill I'd spiral downward and drown hard, into the cold, still._

 

they shake  
like long eyelashes in a hurricane.

 

 

Sirius: jacket leather and jeans and pins, hair and eyes, and fingers and silver, shouting obscenity, swerving through the axes on lightpoles. All lashes under their lights. Sirius: jump and cigarette on the tip of his tongue, the tips of his fingers—narrow eyes at specific moments, where everything sets in, everything fitting. Sometimes you see his jaws clench beneath his skin, and you lean in with your tongue to save that movement. Sirius says you use your tongue too liberally, but really, Padfoot is the one who uses his tongue too liberally, too publicly. Today he is pale and well-fucked against the wall and uses the back of his arm to wipe his mouth and at least it's not humid heat, you grin. Your hips are settling down.

And your heart beats little slower each while, until you can see again. You want to say, as he dresses, the Salomean phrase: regardez la lune. La lune a l'air très éstrange—

How strange, how strange! You grab him and brush your lips by his jaw, his neck, his palms.

 

 

 

Mr Lupin refuses to borrow gold from Mr Black, and spends the last of his hard-earned currency on the camera. He goes hungry for two entire weeks, in the end refusing even nicotine and other unmentionable substances. He uses gloves and sometimes a mask. His colors are crisp when he can afford them. His composition snapshot and unsound. In the red dark room Mr Black asks, many times, what is he doing, but he never speaks and Mr Black is soon bored.

In any case the impressions of wings and stigmata are only imagined, woven through meandering streets and lost girls and (people like) Sirius and uncommon places.

 

I would be in a flat nowhere place of the earth, and every now and then I would walk outside or be driving down a road and the light would hit something and for a few minutes the place would be transformed.

 

 

There are embrasures between the clouds letting the crepuscule seep through. Sirius lies on the park bench and Remus sits at his feet. In the prelude to the dusk something in Sirius shifts that makes him speak in vague, mythological terms. Remus is sitting with a cigarette lit. He will not turn his head. Silent time passes. Suddenly Sirius is cursing at him, scrambling away saying, absurdly, that he is a selfish cunt. Remus throws his arms upwards, to shield his eyes from the sun.

Remus envies Sirius this way, because in the clarity of his conviction he is not blinded by the sun. His own composure, his wordiness, they're just crass in comparison. Or maybe it's just simply crass, and there is no clarity, only falseness.

 

 

I have a whole process, of a steak knife which I use to open my letters, it's like a prayer...

 

 

There was one day when Remus discovered him passed out, strung and still by the door. A hand on the edge, trying to raise himself. Remus managed not to panic and charmed out whatever it was that was in his system. He never spoke of this again, but Remus will think of this later, think of what Sirius had done, think of the pain and the pleasure, think of the throe in his body when he must have opened his veins to the world, think of whatever it was that wasn't, probably.

He thinks of what they were doing. Slowly, slowly.

 

 

She gives me the scythe. (to cut them down)

 

 

That night, Sirius finally conceded that sometimes Muggles knew about good music at least, leaning against a metal door, his cigarette burning out. Neither of them could define the borders of London underground. Neither could afford to give himself into idealizing but there they were, cold with the echoes of The Clash and decidedly drunk. Later, Sirius would learn from Remus's attempts at photojournalism the particulars of their surroundings. Lights, fluorescence, glinting matter thrown back into the dark, fierce from the architecture of heat. Night and street. Golden from the shadow two stray's eyes. The cement under them trembled once more, and gave away.

They looked too fucking lonely, though, one lighting a new cigarette, one leaning away, both of them rootless in the rain of streetlight, flightless because they refused to use their wings.

 

*

 _Radio, Radio_ by Ben Doyle

In the middle of every field,  
obscured from the side by grass  
or cornhusks, is a clearing where  
she works burying swans alive  
into the black earth. She only  
buries their bodies, their wings.  
She packs the dirt tight around  
their noodle necks & they shake  
like long eyelashes in a hurricane.  
She makes me feed them by hand  
twice a day for one full year: grain,  
bits of chopped fish. Then she  
takes me to the tin toolshed.  
Again she shows me the world  
inside her silver transistor radio.  
She hands me the scythe.

 

*

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes include Ben Doyle (obviously,) Joe Strummer, Stephen Shore, Jackson Pollock, Ray Johnson, Oscar Wilde


End file.
